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Michael Harvey has been working with letters for more than sixty years. He has drawn them and cut them, he has written about them and taught them, he has made fonts. He was taught by Joseph Cribb and Reynolds Stone who in turn were taught by Eric Gill, so he links the current generation of lettering and type design with the great revival of the Arts and Crafts movement. Having absorbed its influence he moved on to other letter forms, sometimes exploring for its own sake, always considering the function of what he was doing.

Now he has told the story of his Adventures with Letters in a book that he has written, designed and illustrated with numerous drawings, photographs and type specimens. It’s published by his 47 editions imprint, and we’re very pleased that he’s asked us to distribute it. It is available here, now!

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It’s always nice when our work gets attention, and even nicer when it’s favourable, so we were very pleased to see the review of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde on the Book Blog. As well as being well-researched it features a number of nice photos of the book.

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Today we’re taking bookings for two-week internships for April, May and June.

If you’d like to apply please send an email to internships@handandeye.co.uk. It’s unlikely that we can answer queries and we’ll only be replying to offer places. Making bookings can take several days, so please don’t expect an immediate answer. We ask successful applicants for a deposit of £25 in the form of a cheque made out to Disasters Emergency Committee. It’s returned at the start of the internship or sent to DEC if you cancel within three weeks of the start date.

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We’d like to use our collection of Monotype matrices to make type for people, so we’ve started Hand & Eye Foundry. We’re selling quarter-founts of anything we have in sizes up to and including 14 pt for £25.00 plus postage and packing. We’ll be making a dedicated web site for it if we get sufficient response, and in the meantime you can see what we’re up to on Twitter. In the last couple of days we’ve picked up 80 followers and have had an enquiry from someone looking for some Porson Greek.

We’ll be selling sundries like leads, spaces and quoins too, and we can set your copy and supply the type for you to print.

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We’re very pleased that Books and Vines has had some nice things to say about our Jekyll and Hyde. There are some interesting and complementary comments, too. We learnt there that the correct title of the book is Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with no definite article, and were pleased to see Edward A Wilson’s illustrations for the Limited Editions Club edition of 1952.

We’ve also had a nice email from a reader in the USA:

‘My friend Chris Adamson,’ he writes, ‘who is the guiding light behind the fine press & private press blog and website “Books and Vines” sent digital photos of the book to me via e-mail and it is a clearcut “home-run”, a book I simply could not pass on. The book design is superb and Ms. Barrett’s illustrations are splendid, atmospheric, perfectly in tune with the mood and feel of this small masterpiece. I look forward to receiving it and adding it to my library.”

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‘Evan Davis decodes the formula that took Apple from suburban garage to global supremacy’, says BBC iPlayer of Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy. Well, up to a point. Interesting though it was, the programme didn’t seem to grasp the importance of design in Apple’s success. Lord Stephen Fry, apparently wheeled out as the voice of the user (why is this condescending, self-important public schoolboy so popular?), told us that when things look good we like using them and they work better. We needed a better insight.

Around the time of the first G5 Power Mac Jobs talked about the way design is central to Apple. How the computer worked, both software and hardware, was designed; design was more than a cosmetic afterthought. They thought about how people used computers and made the computers fit around the people, not the other way round. iPhones and iPads are successful not just because Apple found a way to package up the internet into small pieces, as Davis put it, but because using them is insanely easy.

That is an attitude that we share, despite the vast differences between our companies. ‘What will make this piece easy to read?’ is one of the key unspoken questions when we are asked to design something. The answers are usually pretty simple, things like the getting the right number of words on a line and the right relationship between word spacing and line spacing, but they are what make the difference.

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It’s been a while since our last post, for the very good reason that we’ve been busy. We still are, but it’s time to take bookings for internships. For today only we’re taking applications for January – March.

If you’d like to apply please send an email to internships@handandeye.co.uk. It’s unlikely that we can answer queries and we’ll only be replying to offer places. Making bookings can take several days, so please don’t expect an immediate answer. We ask successful applicants for a deposit of £25 in the form of a cheque made out to Disasters Emergency Committee. It’s returned at the start of the internship or sent to DEC if you cancel within three weeks of the start date.

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The biennial Oxford Fine Press Book Fair was held last weekend, and one of our exhibits was our edition of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. We’ve been rather quiet about that book for a while, because shortly after publication last year we found a serious typographic error. We reprinted the text over the summer, and had Angela Barrett’s illustrations reprinted by Northend Creative Print Solutions, who did an outstanding job. We’re very pleased with the result, so it was particularly gratifying that Angela was the sole winner the Parrot Prize for illustration at the fair.